1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to integrated circuits and, more particularly, to data pack/unpack integrated circuits.
2. Related Art
Host adapters are well known in the art. One of the functions performed by a host adapter is to permit communications between serial and parallel devices and systems. For example, data may be transferred between a serial network connection and a parallel system bus connected to a host computer. Data received from the serial network connection is subdivided in packets that have a fixed length (frames) formatted according to a particular network protocol. On the other hand, data transmitted over the parallel bus and stored in a memory of the host computer is divided into variable length data transfers. A scatter/gather table is used to record the location and length of each of the variable length segments stored in host computer memory 155. When the fixed size data segments are received over the serial network connection, the data is unpacked (i.e., the payload is extracted from each frame) and transmitted over the parallel bus to host computer memory 155. Similarly, data received over the parallel bus needs to be packed into frames for transmission over the serial network connection.
In addition, data transfer rates may vary substantially between the serial network connection and the parallel system bus. Thus, the pack/unpack operation may create a bottleneck in the performance of both the serial network connection and the parallel system bus.
There is thus a need for a host adapter that can efficiently perform packing/unpacking operations on data being transferred between a serial network connection and a parallel system bus.